While most of the film blogosphere is wondering why Sony hasn’t yet greenlit a District 9 sequel, our old friends at the Oscar blogs are addressing a potential awards campaign for the sci-fi hit. According to Peter Bart at Variety, an Academy screening of the film over the weekend was very well received (best applause in years? come on), and the news has sparked buzz of a possible Best Picture nod. After all, there are ten available slots this year.

Honestly, I enjoyed the movie very much, but if it’s being considered Oscar-worthy, I’ll be the first to begin the backlash (against the awards push; Armond White already took care of the general backlash). District 9 shouldn’t be nominated for Best Picture any more than Star Trek should. It shouldn’t even be nominated any more than Transformers 2 should. Regardless of how much better it may be.

And I don’t necessarily have anything against a sci-fi movie being up for the award. If Cameron’s Avatar is groundbreaking and brilliant, give it a nomination. I just want to make it clear that District 9 is very good, but it is not that good. And just saying that it deserves an Oscar campaign adds to the continued depreciation of the Academy Awards.

Read what other film bloggers are saying about the District 9 Oscar buzz after the jump:
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• Walden Media is planning a huge blitz to promote their fall Bill Murray starrer City of Ember at ComicCon. The current plan is to “re-create the mythical city depicted in the film on a private two-car train that will transport 25 members of the media on a 2½-hour journey to the convention’s San Diego locale,” accompanied by the film’s director, screenwriter and producer.
• Expect to be inundated with “Hulk Smash!” headlines on come Monday morning. Variety kindly suggests that The Happening “will likely play like a traditional horror film rather than a broad summer title”––read: $20 million opening––leaving the by all accounts imperfect but not that bad Hulk to reel in mid-five figures.
• Sony Pictures Classics, the only studio other tha IFC to seriously stock their shelves last month at Cannes, has announced another acquisition: Palme D’or winner The Class.

• Dreamworks is coming back, baby! All Steven Spielberg needs is a new distribution partner…and one billion dollars in outside financing…and an early exit from his Paramount contract…and an assurance that Jeffrey Katzenberg will take his side if there’s a battle over the Dreamworks name…
• Sony Animation is producing an Alvin and the Chipmunks-inspired live action/CGI Smurfs feature. Insert tasteless joke about random partying starlet turning blue as research for a role …. here.
• Madonna has canceled a screening of her Malawi doc I Am Because We Are at the Glastonbury music festival, because she’s afraid that not enough people are going to show up.
• Hugh Grant and Ziyi Zhang are in talks to star in Lost For Words, a romantic comedy directed by Suzanne Bier. The plot will cleverly circumvent the problem of Ziyi being unable to speak English.

• There’s not much news to report from yesterday’s strike talks (looks like Nikki was right about that pesky press blackout), but we do know that Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards is a expected to join Tim Robbins and Gilbert Gottfried at a star-studded strike rally today in New York’s Washington Square. Meanwhile, this week Carson Daly will become the first late-night host to cross picket lines to tape his show. Yes, Carson Daly has a show.
• My beloved Silent Light took the best picture and best director prizes at the 33st Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival over the weekend
• Dubai International Capital, an investment corp owned by the ruler of Dubai, has acquired a chunk of Sony. The exact size of the investment is unknown, but DIC characterized it in a press release as “substantial.” In other local news, the Dubai Film Festival has announced its lineup, which will include a tribute to Danny Glover as well as “Jordan’s first feature in 50 years.”

• Variety has a run-down on the ten films it thinks fans are most excited about sneaking at Comic-con. At the top of the list are Indy 4 and Star Trek 11; Cloverfield (or Monstrous or whatever it’s called this week) is conspicuously absent. In related news, Paramount has bought Iron Man an Audi, and Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Matthew Goode, Billy Crudup, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Malin Akerman have been cast in Watchmen.
• Showtime has acquired broadcast rights to Nicholas Jarecki’s documentary The Outsider, which offers an inside look (ha ha) at director James Toback. The film, which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005 and had a brief theatrical run last year, will make its cable debut in August.
• Variety has a story on Sony’s massive 2nd quarter profits; The Hollywood Reporter’s got one on Disney’s.

***Apparently resigned to the idea that Evan Almighty can never recoup its costs and is basically the biggest tax write-off ever, Universal has scrapped plans to release the picture in Japan. The studio declined to state a specific reason, but Variety speculates that Steve Carell’s lack of international star power might be part of the problem. Oh, and the fact that Americans didn’t want to see it either.

***Consumer home video spending is down almost five percent, and studios are blaming themselves for releasing so much crap during the first half of the year.

***Sony, which bought online video portal Grouper last year, has changed the site’s name to Crackle as part of an effort to re-brand the property as a vehicle for Sony-produced content, as well as a launching pad for new video stars. Contests in place at launch tempt user participation by offering pitch meetings with Sony execs as a grand prize–as if kids who are getting millions of page views on YouTube would give it all up for a conference call.

Remember last week, when I wondered what would happen with Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales with the director officially moving on to his next project? Shortly after writing that post, I got on an airplane, and Kelly updated his MySpace blog:

As for Southland Tales… we are about halfway through completing all of the new visual effects. We have to deliver everything by the end of summer. I have to tell everyone that the amount of visual effects work being added to the film is SIGNIFICANT… and I am so grateful for the work being done by Thomas Tannenberger and his team at Gradient VFX in Venice Beach.

And I can confirm that a company has been hired by Sony to begin work on a trailer. The release date will be announced very soon.

This post would seem to be carefully designed to telegraph two messages:

1) Those are his caps on SIGNIFICANT. At ComicCon last summer, Kelly distanced himself from the Cannes cut of Southland, insisting that the version shown to critics the previous May lacked the special effects needed to flesh out the story. (Post-Cannes 2006, there were rumors that the stars of Southland were looking for distance, too–rumors which were given credence by the fact that not a single boldfaced name joined Kelly on stage in San Diego.) He’s clearly saying, “This movie looks totally different from the movie that got those crappy reviews.”

2) Based on the phrasing of the final sentence, it;s sounds like Sony isn’t planning on setting a release date until they have a trailer/a better idea of how/when/to whom they can market the film. Considering the time and money they’ve already invested, that would make sense.

The verdict? This news is better than no news, but Kelly fans can hardly breathe easy.

More on Spout:
Southland Tales: What’s The Deal?

Southland Tales
Donnie Darko

For some time high profile business leaders, celebrities and politicians have lived under the threat of the “blogosphere.” The mental scenario follows the Howard Dean story. In one moment of carelessness, something will slip from the mouth, be appropriated by a snarky music-pirating college kid and transformed into a viral bit of content infiltrating millions of inboxes and shattering a life’s work. The Internet has done for public humiliation what the microwave did for dinner.

Now, Sony Pictures is beating the geek squad to the punch. They’re reediting hundreds of television shows from their library (TJ Hooker, Diff’rent Strokes, Starsky and Hutch, Silver Spoons, What’s Happening, etc) into three and a half minute episodes with–and take note– full story arcs. Meaning, they’re admitting what we all knew growing up. Take out the commercials and mindless subplots (Heather Locklear trying to arrest a fat, sarcastic, 12 year old shoplifter) and what you have is three to four minutes of William Shatner on the hood of a burglar’s getaway car.

They say they’re cutting these campy mini-shows together for a generation with a “shorter attention span.” As if the doldrums in these episodes are the responsibility of an ADD generation. However, deep down they’re simply coming clean with what we all knew growing up. If an hour-long police drama can be cut into three and a half minutes, it’s not attention spans that have gotten shorter. It’s changing the channel that has gotten a lot easier.

I just did a post on SpoutBlog’s web and technology side about the cable channel Current TV. A mere year ago the idea of user-generated content as a source of entertainment was so new it was puzzling people; now, in a world with YouTube, the concept is old hat.

So what do you all think about this other aspect of Current TV: letting viewers create advertisements? Here’s what the San Francisco Chronicle article says:

Link: Why Hollywood Movies Prefer to Premiere in New York.

“But the real reason is that New York’s the home base for the burgeoning, always-hungry celeb-photo press, guaranteeing coverage…The joke is that I don’t think you have to show the movie. If you say “red carpet”, they’ll come, they’ll take the pictures, they’ll ask the same questions, and they’ll go home”

This reminds me of a great article I read in The Times a couple of weeks ago about the recent decline in the box office. In the article, Mr. Lynton of Sony said he would be focused on making, “only movies we hope will be really good.” Mr. Shmuger, of Universal, said the he intends to reassert “time and passion” in movie production. He goes on to say that some of his own summer movies should have never been made.

It is evident to me that Hollywood is willing to blow off their audience if it does not effect their bottom-line. But now, audiences are no longer taking Hollywood’s crap and are forcing them to actually think about making quality films. They are no longer fulfilled by the empty experiences of the multiplex. As audiences are turning away from the multiplex, what will we do now for our film watching experience?

Dave